		2008 NZSEE Conference
	Abstracts

Keynote Address Session 1 Session 2 Session 3 Session 4 Session 5 Session 6 Poster Session Session 8

Implementing the Building Act 2004 – Wellington City Approach

Claire Stevens and Katharine Wheeler

As part of the implementation of the Building Act 2004, Wellington City Council (WCC) was required to develop and adopt a policy on earthquake prone buildings within its district. Implementation of this new policy was started in July 2006.

Initially WCC undertook some code comparisons for the Wellington region to identify a date after which buildings were unlikely to be earthquake prone and created a database to identify the buildings that would meet the selection criteria for further assessment.

The policy identifies the assessment tool as the Initial Evaluation Procedure (IEP) prescribed by Assessment and Improvement of the Structural Performance of Buildings in Earthquakes, a guideline developed by New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering (NZSEE) and the process that WCC will embark on once a building has been assessed as having an IEP score of less than 34.

This paper discusses the approach adopted by WCC, some of the challenges that have arisen and knowledge that has been gained in the process.

Paper P70: [Read] [Presentation]

Reflections on aspects of New Zealand’s seismic resilience: comparisons with Californian practice

Andrew Charleson

Observing and reflecting on the earthquake practices of another country is one means of assessing the relative progress being made in one’s own country towards improving its seismic resilience. During a three month stay in California, personal observations broadly linked to structural engineering issues were made of a range of earthquake engineering endeavours. The areas discussed in the paper comprise seismic hazard awareness, construction of residential buildings, seismic retrofitting of earthquake-prone buildings, new construction, introduction of new technologies and architectural detailing for seismic movements. Overall, it appears New Zealand practice is in step with that of California. Even though both regions appear to have some similar strengths and weaknesses there are a number ways New Zealand can learn from current Californian practice.

Paper P59: [Read] [Presentation]

Resilience Urgently Required for a Brittle System Producing Brittle Buildings

John Scarry

A serious decline in professional structural engineering and construction standards has been occurring in English speaking countries of New Zealand’s type for many years now, but, for a large number of reasons has been the worst affected. One paradoxical situation causing major problems is the fact that, whereas all heavily populated urban areas in New Zealand can be subjected to a devastating seismic event at any time, the actual return period of such events is far greater than in other states that take earthquake resistant design seriously, such as California, Japan and Chile. Hence, highly suspect NZ design and construction practices are not exposed and ‘weeded out,’ but tend to accumulate.

With particular reference to the well documented Reason Error Prevention Model developed by Professor James Reason, the author shows how, in New Zealand at this time, all too frequently the numerous parties involved in the design, review, detailing, fabrication, construction and inspection of a particular structure are not only committing the most basic, obvious and very serious mistakes and bad practices, they are not noticing and preventing those made by others.

Within the actual design process itself, the author shows that all too often, the common ‘piece meal’ approach to design leads not to a resilient, robust, redundant ductile design with positive, dependable load paths, but instead to a fundamentally flawed seismic resistant structure, with weakest links where the links should be strongest.

Paper P07: [Read] [Presentation]

Keynote Address Session 1 Session 2 Session 3 Session 4 Session 5 Session 6 Poster Session Session 8